Museum Guide Robot: From Rhino to ABB Cobots

A museum guide robot has a job that sounds simple: meet visitors, lead them from one exhibit to the next and explain what they are looking at. In a crowded hall, with people stepping in front of it all day, that job kept robotics researchers busy for years. This post follows the job from human guides and the first audio tours to Rhino and Minerva, the research robots that led real museum crowds in the late 1990s. Then it looks at this autumn's news from Bishkek and Tokyo, at where ABB robots such as YuMi and GoFa fit, and at what still stands in the way.

A tour guide talks to visitors in front of an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian, 2005. Photo: Quadell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From docents and radio headsets to Rhino and Minerva

For most of museum history a tour meant a person. Guides, called docents in the United States, walk groups through the galleries, answer questions and decide on the spot what to skip when children get restless. Many are volunteers who train on the collection for months before they lead a tour alone. The first step toward automating part of that work came in 1952, when the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under its director Willem Sandberg, introduced what is counted as the first museum audio guide. Visitors carried portable radio receivers with headphones and heard commentary in Dutch, French, English and German, broadcast over a closed shortwave loop.

The counter where visitors borrow audio guide sets at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Photo: Mattes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Audio guides moved from radio to cassette players, then to handheld digital players and phone apps, but they never moved the visitor. Somebody still had to know where things were and lead the way, and that is the gap a robot guide tries to fill. It has to build a map of the building, know where it is on that map while people crowd around it, plan a path to the next exhibit and keep talking. In the 1990s each of those tasks was an open research problem. Doing all of them at once in a public hall, with children poking at the machine, was much harder than doing them in a lab.

A visitor listens to a handheld audio guide at an exhibit on circles at a science museum in Kolkata, 2010. Photo: Biswarup Ganguly / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

In 1997 a team from the University of Bonn put a robot called Rhino into the Deutsches Museum Bonn, where it led visitors through the exhibition. The project's own web page calls it the world's first robotic museum tour guide. The same group, working with Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Learning Laboratory, then built Minerva for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington. Minerva used cameras, laser range finders and sonar, approached people, offered tours and led them from exhibit to exhibit, and web users could send it around the museum too. From 24 August to 5 September 1998 the team logged 620 tours and about 44 kilometres of driving.

The entrance of the Deutsches Museum Bonn, where the Rhino tour guide robot led visitors in 1997. Photo: Axel Hindemith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Guide robots in museums and public buildings today

Guide robots have since moved from research projects into ordinary public buildings. In 2018 the Smithsonian started a pilot with Pepper humanoid robots donated by SoftBank Robotics, placing them in spaces such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian Castle. The robots answered common questions, told stories and posed for selfies. The Smithsonian said it wanted to learn whether they could draw people into less visited galleries and give docents and educators a new tool. Pepper robots also turned up in shopping centres, stations and science centres, mostly greeting people and pointing the way.

A Pepper humanoid robot talks to a child at the Copernicus Science Centre's science picnic in Warsaw, 2019. Photo: Klarqa / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 9 September 2026 Kyrgyzstan's parliament, the Jogorku Kenesh, opened a digital museum in Bishkek with a guide robot built locally by engineer Akosh Asanbaev in about three months. It has a 3D printed body on an aluminium frame, gives tours in Kyrgyz, Russian and English, and uses face recognition to pick out members of parliament and greet them differently. In Tokyo, Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, is leading work on a suitcase shaped AI robot that guides blind and partially sighted people. A public trial at the Toranomon Hills complex runs through October 2026.

Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, which leads work on the AI suitcase guide robot. Photo: Kestrel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a museum guide robot, and none of these projects uses ABB hardware. ABB robots have still worked in front of the public. In 2017 an ABB YuMi conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli at the Teatro Verdi in Pisa, and a YuMi has made coffee for shoppers at Selfridges in London. A dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 or a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could work in a museum as a live demonstrator, writing, sorting or assembling in front of visitors, though nobody has announced such a project. Exhibits like this are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio before the arm goes on show.

ABB's YuMi making coffee at the Smartech bar in Selfridges, London. Photo: ABB

Where guide robots go next, from galleries to the living room

The next step is a guide that moves and also has an arm to point, hand over an object or open a door. ABB has shown a mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, for hospital labs, and its Flexley Mover AMRs already find their way around factories with 3D visual SLAM. A cobot arm on a mobile base like that, working in a gallery or a mall, is something ABB's existing parts could support, but nobody sells it today. It would need speed and force limits that hold up in a crowd, the kind of safe zones and speeds ABB's SafeMove software sets for its robots.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

For homes, the guide idea shrinks into help with getting around. Miraikan wants to offer its suitcase robot as a rental service so blind users can walk through buildings and streets on their own, and its chatbot can answer questions about shops and routes once it has been trained on them. The same mix of mapping, obstacle detection and conversation sits behind the robot guide dogs covered earlier on this blog. A robot that guides a family through a shopping centre uses much the same tools as a home helper that walks an older person to the kitchen at night.

A family tries a Pepper robot's touchscreen in a shopping mall in Japan, 2016. Photo: Nesnad / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The open problems are the ones Minerva's team met in 1998. Crowds block the path and children test the robot, so it has to be slow, careful and hard to upset. Cost is hard to justify for a museum that relies on volunteer guides, and a robot that only repeats a script soon bores people. Even the Bishkek robot was steered remotely by its builder from behind the scenes during the president's visit. Skills matter on the museum side as well: someone has to write the tour, change it when exhibits move and keep the robot running. Tools such as ABB's Wizard easy programming show how that work could move from engineers to the staff who know the collection.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard blocks on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com